Backyard Adventures: Washington!

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It may be thrifty but it looks stout! Good job!

I’d love to take credit for it, but had one of my fab mechanics build it on a slow day. I gathered scrap CRES steel over the course of a couple months, ordered some stainless steel hinge and gathered up monel rivets to fasten the hinge. My mechanic did the rest. Fold flat like a Snow Peak, a bit heavier and just under half the price including the gift card I bought my mechanic.
 
Playing in the snow!!!

Went out near Darrington WA and went up to find some snow and ice. Found some snow covered trails and frozen ponds!! Wanted to practice tire chain installation, different rigging of winch extension lines and recovery straps. Good times in the cold weather. Camped overnight on the Suak River at a lower altitude. Still dropped well below freezing!!
 
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This past weekend we needed to scout the north end of the WABDR for a up coming group trip the first weekend of July. We made it over to the east side of the Cascades via highway 20. If you ever are in WA and highway 20 is open I highly recommend driving it. The scenery is spectacular, although my photos are not!
 
Friday we wanted to drive half of section 5 and all of section 6 of the WABDR. We started at Loop Loop Pass and headed north to the town of Conconully WA. We had to find a work around as part of the BDR is washed out. This becomes more of a problem on Saturday. We ended up on a less spectacular drive around but made it to Conconully on gravel. North of Conconully is Lone Frank Pass 6600’. We checked the the Forest Service web site and it stated it was open, so we pushed on. We arrived at about 6300’ and found a 200 yard long thigh deep snow bank that wasn’t worth the time to get through as we knew it would only get worse.
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We did an about face and hightailed it to the town of Tonasket. We were trying to avoid pavement and get to our end goal of Chopaka Lake but due to late spring runoff numerous roads were closed. You starting to get the picture?
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At the beginning of the long steep grade to Chopaka there were signs stating no access to Chopaka Lake. So we didn’t believe them and we need to find out if the north end of section 6 was accessible we pressed on. Indeed Chopaka Creek had washed out the road to the lake! This is very unfortunate as this lake is spectacular! Needing a place to camp we broke out the maps and found Cold Springs campground. It’s a bit higher in elevation than we wanted but it was getting dark and it was past beer thirty.
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We ended up busting trail in the snow to get to the summit at Cold Springs but the view was great and we were the only people there! After a killer dinner of grilled chicken and salad we built a nice fire and knocked back a few adult beverages.
 
We ended up sleeping in Saturday morning as my work week had been busy and I had been running on about 8 hours of sleep for the past two nights. We lounged a bit made breakfast broke camp to roll into Tonasket WA and fuel up. Back up to Loop Loop Pass we head south towards Lake Chelan. This area south burned severely two years ago and was supposedly closed. We found another work around and made our way to Carlton WA.

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South of Carlton we ran into two separate washout on two separate roads. One was even a washout of a repair in work!! We didn’t make it to Chelan but know enough information to make an entertaining trip out of the WABDR in July!

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